The Book:
Lovesome Dove
By Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster
First Published in 1985
The Talk:
Lonesome Dove is a book of dreams, in all senses of the word. In almost every chapter of this Pulitzer Prize-winning western, there is a character who is talking about a dream or daydreaming or longing for something or in a state of delirium caused by exhaustion or trauma. I lost count the number of times “like a dream” was used. Sometimes the characters are swept up in a cloud—of rain, of dust, of locusts—in which the external world falls away, and they are disoriented and lost in a swirl of timelessness.
Another cause of this dreamscape feel is the point of view. Lonesome Dove is famous for its use of an omniscient narrator that describes the thoughts of multiple characters within a scene. Generally, this is considered bad practice, as it can confuse the reader. The common advice is to stick with one point of view, or at least the same point of view for each chapter or section.
But McMurtry pulls it off, so that we are slipping and wandering between the characters’ minds within a scene itself. It creates a kind of flowing, almost ghostly or angelic tone to the whole book. It creates a space in which all the thoughts of the characters are somehow together, in a unitive, collective oversoul kind of way. Or in the way in which, when we dream, all the people we dream of come from our own mind, though they behave in the dream world as independent figures.
The lost dreams of men
Sometimes the world of Lonesome Dove, which stretches from Texas to Montana, is a sweet dream, but most of the time it’s a nightmare. Most of the cowboys, lawmen, and drifters in the story are attempting to escape their lives, and yet find it impossible to do so, due to chance or circumstance or ignorance.
But the toughest cage that these men find themselves in is the cage of what they think they ought to do, how they think they ought to behave. Don’t act like a sissy, a girl, or a “schoolteacher.” Don’t let a woman talk back to you, and if she does, hit her. Don’t be lovesick for a woman. Respond to any sign of disrespect with violence. Don’t admit you made a mistake. Don’t let another man see you cry. (Nearly every man in this story sobs at some point, after riding off to find a secretive enough place to do it.)
Perhaps most heartbreaking of all is the emotional disconnect between fathers and sons in the book. There are very few interactions between fathers and sons, but when it happens, it’s like two baffled and confused strangers. The father is always silent.
The central story arc of Lonesome Dove involves Call and Newt. It is clear from the beginning that the boy Newt desperately longs for and needs a father figure. Call (due to his sense of how a man “ought” to be) withholds even the slightest hint of warmth or affection from him. And for this reason Newt is left to drift, lost and alone, afraid and constantly feeling like a failure.
As I read the book, I kept thinking that I must be reading into this story, reading ideas about “toxic masculinity” or something, back into the text. And yet it’s obvious from the story that:
The male characters in the story constantly fail to exhibit what they themselves think a man “ought to be.”
When they do follow the cultural code, it usually has bad consequences.
The male characters are deeply unhappy with this whole mess of expectations but cannot see any alternative.
The irony of Lonesome Dove is that all these men are literally in the freest place they could possibly be. They are on the big open plain, far from civilization, law, institutions, culture. They could do anything they wanted, and yet they all feel terribly trapped (and terribly sad and defeated) in the roles they think they have to play. For these men, death—the contemplation of suicide is common—seems the only ultimate relief from this never-ending misery.
Moreover, even as the narrative point of view suggests that all these men’s souls are somehow connected together in some profound way, they can only see themselves as separated, lonely, lonesome.
The women have it even worse
The book is mostly about men, but there are several women in the book, too. The two most prominent women in the book are Lorena and Elmira. Both are former prostitutes, and both spend every scene of the book on alert for physical and sexual assault, a caution that is often justified.
The subplots of Lorena and Elmira are the most traumatic of the book, as they describe lives of constant trepidation punctuated by moments of extreme violence. Men are their greatest threat, and the only way to escape that threat is to attach themselves to less-bad men. Any attempt at independence is swiftly punished by circumstances. They are either thinking about how to evade men or how to get closer to a man who can protect them from other men—and wondering if that man is trustworthy, or even just trustworthy enough, to get by for the time being.
The one woman who escapes this fate is Clara, a pioneer wife on the western Nebraska plains. She stands as a kind of Beatrice figure in the Dante-esque pilgrimage from the Inferno of south Texas to the Paradise of Montana peaks. (Her former suitor, Augustus, is the kind of the cowboy poet of the story.) This parallel is so strong, I would not be surprised if there are many Divine Comedy “easter eggs” in Lonesome Dove that I didn’t pick up on.
Clara combines all the male and female virtues, able to break horses and cuddle babies. She sometimes wears her husband’s clothes, sometimes her own. She is the only character in the story who is fully self-possessed. She fears no man, and elicits a kind of platonic adoration from the men she encounters. She regularly calls out the foolishness of the unspoken rules the men around her follow.
But this almost puts her beyond male companionship:
Clara got her way, and her way often turned out to make sense—and yet Bob more and more felt that her way skipped him, somehow. She didn’t neglect him in any way that he could put his finger on, and the girls loved him, but there were many times when he felt left out of the life of his own family. … Watching his wife, he often felt lonely. Clara seemed to sense it and would usually come and try to be especially nice to him, or to get him laughing at something the girls had done—and yet he still felt lonely, even in their bed.
It’s hard to wake up
Nearly all the bad stuff that happens in Lonesome Dove follows from men thinking they have to do these things they don’t want to do, or be things they aren’t good at being. This creates the sense of inevitability that makes for good drama and good stories.
But where do these rules and expectations come from? Is it part of nature? Or does it come from culture? If it’s natural, does that mean it’s permanent? If it’s cultural, does that mean it’s changeable (and therefore escapable)?
How you answer these questions changes the meaning of the novel: Is Lonesome Dove a novel about the inescapable and universal suffering of human existence? Or is Lonesome Dove a novel that challenges American cultural myths of masculinity, showing that these ideals actually torment the men who try to uphold them, and the women too?
Or perhaps to put it another way: Can we dream a different dream? Culture is a collective dream that we all experience as individuals. And it seems to run—to run us—on its own rules. We find ourselves performing actions and saying words and playing roles that feel as natural as breathing. And yet these actions and words and roles have histories, are made out of dead people’s dreams. And these performances can end up tormenting us and those around us.
John Lennon was wrong when he sang “Imagine”—”It’s easy if you try.” It isn’t easy. We don’t get to crawl out of our cultural nightmares through simple or clever thinking. It’s not easy to escape these waking dreams, which hem us in as much as rivers, snakes, bulls, and brush.
And that’s what makes this novel such a profoundly sad book: No matter how much they want something different, no matter how hard they try, none of the cowboys in Lonesome Dove ever find a different way.